Rupert M. Loydell: A
Fire in the House of Ice
(Snowblind Publications, 2006; chapbook, 25pp, no price listed)
As a child, my favourite fairground attraction was the Hall of Mirrors
(well, after candy floss and second equal with the dodgems). In A
Fire in the House of Ice Rupert Loydell has provided a version for
grown-ups and I'm delighted. The poems reflect and distort one
another like chipped prisms: Loydell employs his now-familiar collage
technique, using phrases drawn from a variety of sources, which are listed
in the back, to build poems in a range of styles and forms. These range
from the lyric 'Birthday':
My eighth year in the igloo of parenthood.
Outside, autumn has arrived with the rain;
we won't be able to go to the beach today
to the concrete 'Ad Reinhardt at the North Pole':
nothing more than a black square on a white
field
nothing
more than a black square on a white field
which repeats until it forms a perfect square, then leaves one line
hanging over. This sort of formal playfulness, depending on your outlook,
provides hours of fun or material for an internal rant about experimental
poets being too damn 'clever-clever' as my grandmother might
have put it.
Of course, you could just read the poems. And if you think you belong
to the school of ranting grandmothers you'll be pleasantly surprised
to be taught to suck a few collage-scrambled/unscrambled lyrical eggs.
I have to confess that in the past I've felt that Loydell's
work, at least with collages, has sometimes lacked a certain musicality;
here the material is shaped as much by the ear as by the eye. Listen
to this from 'Download':
In our igloo, life has melted into a unique
shape:
ambiguity in the first place (written on pencil or
leaves),
numbered stairs in ascending order (difficult to climb),
and unnumbered stars outside (impossible to count).
There is a pair of poems, forming sections in the first and last sequences
in the book, which are almost perfect reversals of each other. The first
ends:
You
may think I am
teaching my grandma to suck eggs. I'm
not.
The last begins:
I am teaching my grandmother
to suck eggs, leading her astray.
Suck on that then Granny, or not. So the intellectual conceit of this
pamphlet mirrors the aural one. Loydell sets the poems up to distort
each other: stances, postures and ideas bounce, enlarge, correct, and
most importantly echo in identical or similar language. In the first
section of the opening sequence 'Lines on the point of disappearing' (a
beautiful, double-pivoted triple pun) Loydell sets out his stall, and
I think he might just mean it:
Words always lead to others,
notes refer to other books:
endless signposts pointing
everywhere and nowhere,
open maps for the intrigued.
Later, in 'Me and the Here and Now', concerns regarding
the link between what used to be called 'artistic inspiration' and
techniques drawing on found material, or between self-reflection and
the reflection of external artefacts (ie the truly outside from which 'inspiration' must
be drawn, in chunks of whatever shape and size) are made explicit:
In verse one I tried to substantiate
the link between inner and outer,
discuss the syntax of boundaries,
the patterns of spaces and masks.
And the symbol Loydell chooses to carry most of the burden
of this is the igloo. I don't know about you, but I can only really think
of one type of igloo. I imagine that if you asked a bunch of people
to think of an igloo, any igloo, they'd all come up with pretty much
the same mental picture. The igloo is so culturally alien (apologies
to the Inuit Loydell fan-base, who might find this review even
less helpful than other readers: don't worry, you're not missing
much) that it takes on something of the quality of a Platonic form.
But this igloo is different: sometimes it is nearly red, sometimes made
of reflecting glass, or slate, stone, wax… The list goes on. And
it's not even Loydell's igloo. And here the collection gains
added depth: not only does Rupert Loydell build an internally reflective
structure, he also draws light (and not just light) from outside in the
form of Mario Merz's igloo sculptures and in the process sets up
a new multi-polarity.
Loydell's primary technique in this pamphlet, as already noted,
is collage, which is of necessity made up of the author's immediate
reading / viewing experience. But because Loydell also draws explicitly
on Merz's work, in a different medium but also utilising elements
of collage, tensions emerge and the collection acquires a deliberately
irrational and carefully overlaid sense of duplicity. This duplicity
spirals into multiplicity as the shattered individual voices of the source-texts,
most in a sense collages themselves (compendiums, critical works, blogs,
letters etc.), push against coherence and find themselves at the mercy
of a different artistic framework.
In addition an almost macabre collaboration between visual art and the
written word ensues; macabre in that it incorporates the potential for
a monologue-conversation creatively airing the multiple viewpoints of
the two main protagonists, living and dead, as well as the objects they
have created, which all but invites misunderstanding and confusion. This
generates a current that undercuts the surface shimmer of these transparently
beautiful poems.
In A Fire in the House of Ice Loydell's 'I s' fragment
and regroup in the presence of collaborators fashioned from the author's
found phrases, which are made to speak as a single unfocussed personality
by the tonal consistency of the authorial voice; but this voice is distorted:
it cannot be absolutely personal and is replaced by a kind of nightmare
textual ringmaster (though I'm sure Rupert Loydell is perfectly
charming on a personal level) whose task as narrator is to guide readers
through his beautiful, slightly ghoulish, and certainly icily controlled,
circus' performance.
In the context of this high-wire, high-strung possibility, I like to
think of the following passage, from the penultimate section of 'Lines
on the Point of Disappearing,' as the inspirational instant at
which Dr Frankenstein "Ringmaster" Loydell encounters the
lightning flash idea of "Monster" Merz-Igloo's ghost:
Dark associations and mythical allusions
are embedded in detailed manipulations
of impulse and import. I have the impression
that I have invented an art form which breathes,
that is restless, knowledgeable, savage
and spiritual.
But I won't, because that would be old-fashioned and all Modernist-Romantic,
and this collection deserves better (damn these pesky post-modern critics).
So buy this; be frightened; be impressed. I've hardly scratched
the surface of what could be said about this 24-page pamphlet. It may
just be the best thing Rupert Loydell has ever done. Now, if you don't
mind, I'm going to carry on reading it.
Copyright © Nathan Thompson, 2007.
All quotations are copyright © Rupert M. Loydell, 2006.
